The American Dream Part One: Planting the Seed

No idea has been more centrally rooted in identifying who we are, and who we want to become, than the American Dream. The dream was, and always will be, a notion society idealized and used as a benchmark to determine an individual’s success.

What started as a small seed that gave people hope, to pursue a life of stability and happiness, slowly took root and grew into society’s ever-changing ideologies, the expansion of America’s melting pot, and mass consumption of goods.

The land of opportunity

The American Dream began long before the term was actually coined. Immigrants coming to America understood the dream meant they had a destiny and could be successful regardless of the social class they were born into.

Even at our lowest we found hope

In 1931 during the Great Depression, when the term was originally introduced by American writer and historian James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America, America was at its worst. Adams carefully and eloquently described the dream, writing:

“That dream of land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement…It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

During this time of economic strife, people everywhere looked to the term with hope and anticipation for success. The overwhelming sense of purpose felt by the first immigrants who came to America, and now by those Americans experiencing the Great Depression, could finally be described by the three simple words Adams coined: The American Dream.

Although the term Adams wrote about did not reference success being directly linked to wealth, as America slowly began to recover from the Great Depression, the dream began to take root and grow into something much larger than Adams anticipated.

Read PART 2 of our “The American Dream” series